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So a friend of mine was actually being treated for what they
thought was a brain tumor here at Stanford Hospital.
A few months into her treatment she actually fell into
a coma while she was at home in San Francisco.
We called an ambulance and they took her
to the nearest hospital which was UCSF,
and it was a Friday.
Now UCSF and Stanford are really the
two leading hospitals in the world.
They are 35 miles from each other in the heart of Silicon Valley,
in the innovation at the center of the world and in
2012 UCSF spent $160 million on a new medical record
system with a company in the space called Epic.
Stanford actually uses that same exact software
to manage the medical records on their campus.
Despite all of this,
UCSF was unable to obtain her medical files outlining her condition,
her latest MRI results,
and other health details for four days.
It was the weekend and there was no human being
to transfer this vital information 35 miles.
UCSF had no choice but to run the test again.
I tell this story because a lot of the problems
in healthcare are not technology problems.
I wish they were technology problems because
there are lot of really smart technologists,
but the technology to remotely share health records is not novel,
it's not a groundbreaking technology.
It's a systemic problem.
We treat medical records as though they were Stanford's
property not the patient's property.
There was no financial disincentive or penalty
for Stanford not to share those records.
And UCSF actually made more money by
being able to run those tests again.
There is an incentive problem for providers not to
be interoperable and that's truly a market failure.